Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By : Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D
Book Image

Flow-based Leadership: What the Best Firefighters can Teach You about Leadership and Making Hard Decisions

By: Judith L. Glick-Smith Ph.D

Overview of this book

There comes a day when we have to make a tough decision under stress. That decision might change the course of our life. Flow-Based Leadership helps you improve your decision-making skills through the use of some great real-life stories of firefighters. The book first introduces the feeling called ‘flow’—teaching by example its importance in decision-making. Next, you’ll explore various techniques to initiate flow in critical situations and how to respond when flow doesn’t occur as expected. You will learn how to implement flow-based decision making and flow based-leadership within personal and professional circumstances. You will next encounter an extreme, experiential training program called Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD), and how it helps special military forces like Navy Seals and Army Rangers to maintain a calm focus in chaotic situations. Towards the end, the book uses the GSD program to describe the flow-based organizational framework and how it can be integrated into your life and workplace to achieve better decision-making skills. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use flow-based leadership in your personal and professional life maintain clarity and confidence under duress.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Setting the Context

Most people have optimal experiences while doing what they love most, when time seems to slow or even stand still, and the right decisions come easily. During such episodes, everything feels like it is coming together as it should.1 There is a heightened awareness around making the right choices, and the impact those choices will have on others and the environment. It feels good to operate in flow.

How might you consciously choose to live your life in this flow state on a regular basis? And how might organizations facilitate flow experiences for their employees, thereby aligning talents with organizational mission, accelerating innovation, fostering a culture of safety, and by extension, increasing personal, organizational, and communal well-being?

Studies by researchers of flow, such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Martin Seligman, and others, show that the more experience and training a person has in a given area or task, the more flow experiences that person...